The Impact of Music on Emotions
For centuries humans have expressed their emotions through music, which was meant to reach the hearts of the listeners and to sooth the psyche of the creators. Associations between musical features and emotion differ among individuals. Appearance emotionalism claims many listeners' perceiving associations constitute the expressiveness of music. Which musical features are more commonly associated with which emotions are part of music psychology.
Research into music and emotion seeks to understand the psychological relationship between human affect and music. The field called music psychology covers numerous areas of study, including the nature of emotional reactions to music, how characteristics of the listener may determine which emotions are internally felt, and which components of a musical composition or performance may elicit certain reactions and internal states in the listeners.
Stephen Davies calls his view of the expressiveness of emotions in music "appearance emotionalism", which holds that music expresses emotion without feeling it. Davies was the first to claim that "music is expressive of emotions in virtue of displaying emotion characteristics in appearance". (2013: 221).
According to the author, objects can convey emotion because their structures can contain certain characteristics that resemble emotional expression. He further claims that, "The resemblance that counts most for music's expressiveness ... is between music's temporally unfolding dynamic structure and configurations of human behaviour associated with the expression of emotion". (2006:181). The observer can factually note emotions from the listener's posture, gait, gestures, attitude, and comportment.
It should in this connection be noted that music has the power to penetrate into our internal world, to elicit emotions, and to bring us back in chunks of time and space. Moreover, it has been found through research that special frequencies have the potential of healing humans and non-humans. Let us hence observe the chart below elucidating the emotions that can be elicited through frequencies:
As can be seen in the infographic above, higher frequencies elicit more enjoyable emotions such as love, joy, peace, and enlightenment. This is the very reason that music therapy is nowadays largely being applied for healing souls, loneliness, sadness, and illness.
To sum up with, when found in times of hardship, we can consider taking a sip of good music such as Jazz, R'n'B, Soul, Rap, Hip-Hop, Rock, etc. per our mood and, thus, change the outward reality through the power of music which has the ultimate chance of bringing people together.
Enjoy an amazing piece of music:
领英推荐
Truly yours,
Anna Maria Rostomyan
P.S. Cover image generated through AI.
References
Davies, Stephen (2013) [2011]. Musical Understandings and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.?221
Davies, Stephen (2006). ‘Artistic Expression and the Hard Case of Pure Music’, in M Kieran (Ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, Malden: Blackwell, pp. 179-91.